Antihero stories in movies must have existed at least since the invention of Brylcreem, and actors taking a dab hand at making their own films for surely a handful of decades, before Bud Cort took a stab at both.  One of the most interesting and entertaining things about this movie, however, is the precarious crossroads of these.  Like a Charlie Chaplin clawing upwards from hell, we are presented with a character study of a man totally unlikeable but endlessly watchable.

Cort not only helms his first picture (well into a long period of obscurity after “M*A*S*H*” and “Harold and Maude”), but stands in front of it, contorting himself into an obnoxious, punchable doofus.  His Ted Whitley is a man who simply cannot be loved, and I refuse to believe he ever had a social worker or mother to lie about his good looks.  He is a poet (a very, very awful one) Vietnam vet, and while we may learn bits and pieces of his life here and there, he may as well have been a creature from the muck, taking the corporeal shape of the war and the collapse of the sixties.

“Ted and Venus” begins with a shot of Venice Beach about a half hour before the sun comes up.  A dark blue haze (though it could just be the transfer I have) sets a dour, hopeless mood.  Over some anti-war funk (soundtrack almost wholly and dutifully supplied by Swamp Dogg), we see various vets andhomeless midgets scuttle about, culminating in Whitley shouting to the beach, with natty and long/bald hair and grizzled beard, totally smashed.  We can’t yet hear what he is saying, but we know it must suck and be pathetic.  (Later, as we will find out, it may have been his local prize-winning poem that begins, “I want a tubetop venus / who undulates my soul / and my shorts.”)

Then, all of a sudden, a gorgeous hourglass girl, backlit by the rising sun comes up through the surf like a scene from “10” or “Splash”.  It is then, at this point, when we cut back to Whitley, eyes wide and totally hilarious, that the movie’s first (of possibly thousands) tonal shift happens.  The film moves from slapstick comedy to creepy drama constantly, sometimes within the same scene. If the editing wasn’t lightning fast, it might be a chore to sift through.  But there are enough visual gags (and cuts to naked body parts) that buoy the movie’s structural weirdness.

The next morning, we find out the object of his beachly desire (a thoroughly bodacious Linda played by Kim Adams, who is probably most famous for a bit part in “Species II”, lol) is a coordinator at a housing program in the area.  He gets obsessed.  And more obsessed.  And restrained.  And then breaks out.  And gets more obsessed.

He phonecalls her, panting and undersexed.  He patiently waits to steal a chainsaw from a juggler, he promises his own severed fingers if she won’t return his love, and finally tears up her apartment with said chainsaw after he loses control of it, obviously never acquainting himself with one before.  He masturbates to a poem he wrote about her, while imagining himself musclebound and whisking her away in an animated fantasy looking like it was ripped straight out of “Heavy Metal”.

They must have had a hell of a time selling this movie, if it didn’t go straight to video.  In fact, on my copy, the most prominent thing above the title is an inserted pic of Woody Harrelson and Rhea Perlman, apparent friends of Cort’s.  They are in the movie for a combined total of four minutes at best.  Bud is as lonely as he is in the movie in the corner of the cover, right where your eye would naturally go last.  Also, it promises that “a lonely poet chases the woman of his dreams in this memorable romantic comedy”.

This is far, far from your average rom-com.  You have to, well.. you have to be a serial killer to think stuff like “I want to eat your oyster”, “I want to feel your teeth on my rod” or “Linda, trust your pussy” are perfectly quaint Sandlerisms.  And while I can’t say that Cort creates a character that will get any sympathy (besides his only friend, stoner and painter Max, played like the only voice of reason in the movie by James Brolin), he succeeds somehow in not letting us turn away.  If he is a self-destructive faux artist, then we will relish his every redeeming pratfall.

Now, I can’t say such a trainwreck of a character will endear anyone to the plight of veterans or those on welfare, but it is certainly a movie that is something special and weird, and god bless Mr. Cort for putting it all on the line.